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President Obama traveled to Pennsylvania and Florida on Tuesday to sell his $447 billion proposal to spur job growth. Last month, he took the bill straight to Virginia and Colorado and urged his audiences to push Congress to pass it. On Friday he will do the same in Detroit -- though he will be selling it in piecemeal after the Senate rejected the measure Tuesday night. And next week, he will visit Asheville, N.C., and circle back to the Old Dominion.

The president is hugging these pockets of an America hard-hit by the financial downturn, and for good reason. His visits are official, but they are also categorically political. By visiting these states with what he sees as a pivotal piece of legislation in hand, Obama is signaling areas at play, ones that are likely bellwethers for the 2012 elections.

The term “bellwether” is often bandied about in election conversations, but in this case its meaning is two-fold: a state that reads the mood of the rest of the country and one a candidate strategically needs to carry in order to win the White House. Since the election is still 14 months away, it’s difficult to definitively apply this label to specific states. But looking at one state each from the Rust Belt, the Midwest, New England, the Mountain West, and the South gives us a viable barometer of where those regions appear to be headed next November.

Pennsylvania:

Keystone State voters have backed the Democratic nominee for president since 1992. But none went on to win the general election by as wide a margin as Obama did in 2008. He beat John McCain last cycle by 10 points, carrying the eastern counties by a sizable margin and losing the western counties by a percentage point. John Kerry and Al Gore won there by less than 5 percent of the vote, suggesting that outside of the 2008 race, the presidential contest here has been close.

In the past decade, the state had been trending more blue than red, especially in the Philadelphia suburbs and in Lehigh County and Northumberland County, where many well-educated, moderate swing voters reside. After the 2008 election, the state’s congressional delegation comprised 12 Democrats and seven Republicans. Democrats ran the governor’s mansion and the majority of the state house.

But the 2010 midterm results shifted the balance of power in Pennsylvania, as it did in several other states. Voters last cycle chose a Republican governor, and reversed the Democrat-to-Republican ratio of the congressional delegation. The state house also flipped to Republican control.

“The 2010 election was, by any calculation, transformative,” says Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll and a professor of public affairs at the Lancaster, Pa., school.

Madonna’s polling puts the president’s approval rating in the mid 30s. He leads most of his Republican rivals by wide margins but Mitt Romney, the GOP front-runner, is much closer, trailing by just seven points. “That’s a problem for the president,” says Madonna. “If Obama can’t win Pennsylvania, it’s going to be very difficult for him to win re-election. Ohio is a bit more Republican in swinging. In 2004, it was about Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. [In 2012], if he loses Pennsylvania, he loses Ohio and Florida and he loses the election.”

Still, he cautions, it’s early, noting that “the problem is we don’t yet know what the economy will look like next fall.” Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate hovers just above 8 percent. Though that is below the national 9.1 percent average, it's still high, and if the needle doesn’t move over the next 14 months, the president could be in trouble.

But Obama also holds an advantage over his Republican challengers. Pennsylvania doesn’t hold its primary until April, and by that time, the nomination could be shored up for one of them. The primary candidates are likely to spend more energy and resources competing in the early and Super Tuesday states, which could leave them little time for campaigning in Pennsylvania. “They’re not spending much time here; not coming in and doing retail politics,” says Madonna of the GOP contenders. Obama, comparatively, has already spent a significant amount of time in the state since taking office, and is likely to make several more trips over the next year, especially since the state is in play.